First, a confession that comes as no surprise to anyone who reads this weblog: I’m a Flickr fanboy. And for me, being a fan has extended way beyond merely using Flickr as a personal photo-sharing service, but also looking for ways to use the site’s API on our company’s website and for other ways to use Flickr as platform for marketing, storytelling and business-related networking.

Second, another confession that comes as no surprise to anyone who reads this weblog: I’m a Make magazine fanboy. Since the magazine was first announced, I’ve used it as an example of how and why a print magazine still works in this age of whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-week (digital?). The technology-centric publishers of Make magazine know why they launched a print magazine and not something called a magazine that was online. (Although at first, they used the goofy word, “mook.”) The publisher (O’Reilly) completely and thoroughly understands everything there is to know about the economic potential of print publications that explain digital phenomena — they are masters of that category in book publishing. The “print” versions of Make are highly anticipated by their subscribers. Their readers bookmark articles and would no more throw away an old copy than your grandmother would throw away an issue of National Geographic. The Make magazine folks — especially Phillip Torrone — are also some of the most natural blog-savvy, social media people I’ve ever encountered. The readers of the magazine know the people who work for the magazine — and they are a community — not merely the word community magazine publishers often use as a faux-term to describe a database containing the names of all their subscribers. How do you know your brand is a community? When your readers refer to themselves as something other than “reader” or “user” (as in, Makers) and they look forward to hanging out with each other at the “faire.”

So it should come as no surprise that I’m over-flowing with kudos for Make’s newest savvy move in hiring a Flickr photo curator who will help discover some of the how-to gems being constantly added by Make readers (oops, I mean, Makers) to its Flickr pool.

When I write about magazines and community and conversational media and all that other stuff I drone on-and-on about, this is what I’m talking about.

Technorati Tags: flickr, makezine, make magazine, puppy

I grabbed this screen shot last night to go with a post I was going to make today, asking, Hasn’t it been two weeks since Steve Jobs announced that a free Apple TV software upgrade allowing movie rentals would be available within two weeks. Thanks to arstechnica.com, I got my answer before posting the question: Sure, enough, it has been two weeks but Apple is now saying (buried in a back-patting release), that the new Apple TV software will be available “within two weeks” of today.

Why I care? I’ve been planning a brief video demonstrating how the AppleTV is a great example of emerging new channels for mediacasting by companies and associations. In other words (Apple-groupies), I was merely trying to be an Apple fanboy evangelist.

A long-standing complaint of mine with business-to-business media is that too often they focus their coverage on the transactions of business rather than leading readers to a deeper understanding of more critical issues related to their industry. Don’t get me wrong: the transactions of an industry are important news and it is a requirement that a serious B2B media company break those stories — who’s buying whom, who’s got what new account, personnel moves, financial deals. It’s just that too often, those become the primary focus of a medium — and there’s lots more news out there than who’s getting fired or bought.

A long time ago, I claimed that I don’t blog about transactions unless I’m personally involved or I am friends with someone involved or I believe some highly-visible party involved in the transaction deserves what’s happening — good or bad.

I was reminded this morning what my problem with most B2B transaction stories when I saw this story from my friends at Folio: magazine called: Why Randall-Reilly Sold to Investcorp.” Nothing earth-shattering in the story, but it attempts to answer to the question I — and I’m sure at least 2 or 3 others — had yesterday when I saw the news about the sale — the question we always have when we get news that seems to be pulled straight from press release. Going past the press release quotes to attempt to answer the question “Why?” is what good B2B media does.

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